a memory i just had
before music came into my life hard
My school didn’t have air conditioning.
Near the end of elementary, they decided to install one in a bungalow, essentially a double wide trailer propped up in the grass area where we used to play flag football. In it they fashioned a makeshift library full of books housed in gnarled yellowed mylar, compelling me to flick the sharp edges. Walking up the noisy incline and feeling the cool air billowing out onto my body, there was no better feeling, a respite from the heat that aggravated my skin issues. Inside, every step wobbled the place. The adults wobbled it harder. And when there was some ‘book fair’, it was an earthquake.
I’d hide in the back, piling up books to check out, and above me circling the length of the trailer were Read Across America paraphernalia Elmer’s glued to the walls showing how many books students had read so far. I wanted to be first, but I didn’t like seeing my name, most likely written on a laminated star, displayed for everyone to see. Even then I was embarrassed of myself, that I was a thought in someone’s mind at all.
But it sure was nice having AC in that little bungalow where I could escape.
When you had a report, though, you went to the county public library: a brutalist structure, like a rained out bunker with slanted gray walls, sunken below street level. A dozen encyclopedias and hardbacks just to write a one-page—double sided—essay about…I don’t know: the California Missions; photosynthesis. Remember writing things by hand? The callus on my middle finger is still there. The sound of old dot matrix printers, the continuous feed of perforated paper. Having to look for a specific reference in all that text before you could write a single sentence. And if you didn’t know something you wanted to know, you just didn’t know it, ever. Silver lining was that your teacher probably didn’t know either.
You went online to instant message random people, play Need For Speed. Maybe you’d boot up an outdated copy of Encarta so you could fill out the last two lines of your wide ruled paper. There was no habit, yet, no reliance on the internet. You discovered what you could, and when you did it was truly yours. Your own secret. Your hard-earned sliver of knowledge. When you shared that info with someone, that would have likely been the first time they’d heard it.
Now I barely read. Can’t find the impulse. I can close my eyes, pretend I’m back there. And in that darkness it’s always autumn before Halloween, before I ever make my mistakes and choose the wrong paths, or it’s winter when the jacaranda trees shed their purple petals, millions of them lining the sidewalks where I’m walking with my books in my backpack and one in my hand as I read it.
this is such a gorgeous piece of music omg
This is beautiful and this picture is one of my favorites to ever exist.